Agency,Womanhood and the Epistemology of the Corporeal in Mamoni Raisom Goswami’s The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker and Arupa Patangia Kalita’s The Story of Felanee

Abstract

The article aims to interrogate the contested category of womanhood by looking at literary narratives. Adopting a critical vocabulary underpinned by ‘corporeal feminism’, this reading investigates fictional episodes that dramatise the construction of a cultural imaginary informed by the hegemonic enterprise of masculine subjects. Such settings accommodate the complexity of a gendered landscape by bringing the female selves into problematic proximity with the male agency. In this article, an attempt has been made to analyse two Assamese novels written by women novelists—Dantāl Hātir Uñe Khowā Hāwdāh [Trans. The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker] by Mamoni Raisom Goswami and Phelāniı̄ [Trans. The Story of Felanee] by Arupa Patangia Kalita—both refracting serious slippages of the gendered spaces. The texts also accommodate inversions of such spaces. In so doing, it has been argued that a significant shift in the dominant practices of representations is marked by the novels. Both texts connect the embodied personal experience of womanhood with the socially situated selves and articulate what appears to be a subversive logic of corporeal performativity. Drawing on the critical currents in feminist literary theory, the current article offers a close reading of the novels, analysing the ways in which the fictional frames respond to the production and prohibition of gendered identities.